There are TWO skills I have learned from fencing that have helped me make this difficult transition into medical school:
1. You do something every day because you love it. But it is not always fun. If someone trains in a sport for 36 hours per week for 15 years and they tell you that each one of those mornings they woke up bright-eyed and said “YAY!!! Let’s go to practice!”, they are lying to you. It’s hard. It can hurt. It’s stressful. There’s pressure. There will be times when you think you aren’t learning anything, or you don’t understand what you’re learning, or you even doubt IF you want to learn what you’re learning. If you have a passion to be good at what you do, and to perform when it is time to perform, you will.
This is identical to medical school. We are here because we love medicine, and even more importantly, we love people. It’s incredibly exciting to finally be sitting in a classroom and doing a differential diagnosis rather than learning organic chemistry compounds that we will never see again. But this isn’t always fun. I don’t wake up every morning bright-eyed and said “YAY!!! Let’s go to class!”, and, if I said that, I’d be lying to you. This is hard. It’s stressful. The workload and expectations are immense. BUT, I love it here. I love the work, I love the people, I love the faculty, I love the professors, I love everything that this school has to offer. I do this because I love what I WILL do when all the fruits of hard work come together. If I hold onto that passion to be good at what I do and to perform when it is time to perform, I will never lose my drive to become a physician and constantly continue to improve.
2. There’s passive practice and there’s active practice. A good analogy is with reading a book. Have you ever read a book and you get through one or two pages before you realize you have not really “read” or processed anything you just read, but were just reading the words on a paper? The same thing happens in training. Some athletes go months training this way. They come to practice, do what the coach says to do, fence whoever they need to fence, then go home. It’s not that they are not hard-working, it's that practice then becomes inefficient. A good practice becomes “good” because you won all your matches and didn’t make a lot of mistakes. Active practice is constantly asking the questions “What is my goal for today?”, “Why am I doing this?”, “How can I apply this?” Every practice matters, each lesson is an opportunity, and your practice is ENTIRELY up to you and under your control.
Every lesson in medical school is an opportunity. YES, that sounds incredibly cheesy, but fencing and medical school are the two realms where I am surrounded by so many unbelievably accomplished and passionate individuals who want to share their knowledge. I can read the material and regurgitate it on an exam, and maybe even get a passing grade that way. But it’s the same as mindlessly reading a book. Passive learning is easy, but active learning is when I UNDERSTAND what it is I’m learning, so that I can seamlessly apply it in the future.